The explanation is simple enough: texts die because our thinking evolves. Spencer, who posited that we apply his own version of evolutionary biology to the study of societies, was killed by the very idea he himself advanced.
We might even call it a suicide. At a minimum, it had to be on your bookshelf. I suspect few of my students have heard of the book, much less know its argument. If Parsons were correct in suggesting that texts die because thinking inevitably evolves, then perhaps texts that never die would be ones that make claims about which our thinking does not, or cannot, evolve—because those claims are so true as to be obvious.
For while ideas have evolved far beyond Goffman, he is still widely read, taught, and admired. His ideas may no longer be considered the fittest, but the works in which he presented them have survived.
Some of this is due to how he writes. Upon rereading Goffman to write this essay, I still marveled at his tendency to use the everyday as a mode of explanation. This capacity to evoke through vivid analogy could be part of what makes Goffman Undead. This is not a specific or particular argument based in some empirical conditionality.
It is one whose truth transcends such limits. Such a quality is hardly fashionable today. But the mistake is one rather easily made. Action, for Goffman, is not an individual affair, but instead embedded within what others are doing; he suggests that we shift our analysis from the individual to the interaction. And finally, the play is not simply what happens on stage.
Burke, writing primarily within the field of rhetoric, introduced his idea of dramatism a full decade before Goffman, in the book A Grammar of Motives. This means looking at the individual actor who , the action they take what , the contexts of that action when and where , and the purpose or reason behind the action why. But whereas Goffman walks his readers through the everyday examples of the plumber and the undertaker—what could be more universal than shitting and death? Burke is brilliant but inaccessible.
I continue to teach Goffman in part because he is the opposite of inaccessible. He is quickly grasped, though often incorrectly so. The origin of the work itself is little known to its readers, and provides some surprising, even counterintuitive hints as to why it might be Undead. Goffman rarely references this empirical work, but it is the hidden foundation upon which his text rests. How he ended up writing his dissertation is somewhat of a curiosity.
He was not Scottish, or European, and at the time of his research —51 , most sociologists were embedding themselves in urban rather than rural communities.
Cities, after all, were the presumptive future of most social life. There was something different about Goffman. Goffman was born in Alberta, Canada, on June 11, , to a Jewish family. He entered the University of Manitoba, pursuing a degree in chemistry. He interrupted his studies to work at the National Film Board, in Ottawa, and during this period he also met Dennis Wrong, a young man who would go on to have an illustrious sociological career, and who recruited him to the discipline.
Goffman transferred to the University of Toronto, soon graduating with a degree in sociology and moving to the University of Chicago, in , to do graduate work. His MA thesis looked at audience reactions to radio soap operas, using survey research. He seemed to have little interest in this, or in the kinds of questions that sociologists were asking about the general structure and functioning of society; he was interested, it seems, in more universal human experience, and in rejecting some of the orthodoxy of his peers.
And so, four years after enrolling, he moved to the Shetland Islands, and for eighteen months lived on the Island of Unst. He pretended to be interested in agricultural techniques, and the locals largely thought perhaps correctly that he was a spy.
This dissertation is about the intersection of rituals and everyday context on the island of Unst. He outlines the basic organizing principles of different kinds of social occasions—a whist social, a picnic, a public political meeting, and so on. The tendency in the text is to create taxonomies and categories—a disposition Goffman would embrace throughout his career.
Such a social taxonomy is distinct from a social theory. For sociologists, theories are about the relationships among categorical elements, wherein the scholar articulates not just the substance of the relationship, but often the mechanisms behind such relationships. Marxism, for example, is a theory insofar as it articulates relations among classes, and the mechanisms behind such relations e. Goffman, by contrast, is more interested in making lists and articulating social types that in Presentation become characters or roles.
After writing up his dissertation, Goffman briefly worked as an assistant for Edward Shils, an enormously influential sociologist who worked in the Parsonian tradition, linking German and American social theory and studying the role of intellectuals in public policy a topic that Goffman, over the course of his life, seems to have had no interest in.
In , five years after completing his PhD, Goffman was offered a position as a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Presentation was first published by the University of Edinburgh, in , to a little acclaim and much confusion. There is praise, but little that would suggest the author would go on to have an illustrious academic career.
Potter famously wrote parodies of self-help books; it was not a compliment. Perhaps in light of the tepid response, Goffman edited and expanded the book for an American audience and the edition we all know was published in Within three years Goffman published both Asylums and Encounters , and was quickly promoted from visiting assistant professor to full professor.
Goffman was constantly surrounded by exceptional scholars. At Chicago, there were both the esteemed faculty about him and the growing body of graduate students, many Jewish and many veterans, and some who were both Howard Becker and Herbert Gans, for instance. Lloyd Warner. Goffman was a great man among great men of the postwar intellectual era. His fame grew steadily, eventually eclipsing all those around him. Goffman died of stomach cancer in , shortly before he was to give his address to the American Sociological Association, as their president.
Erving Goffman died at the height of his fame, having just turned sixty. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was his first and most influential book.
He trained few students to lay claim to his legacy. And no area particularly claimed him. He could have been a social psychologist, but his approach decentered the individual and instead located observations between individuals, within their interactions. He made ethnographic observations, but his examples were more often made up—like the coroner or the plumber—than based in data. Results Citations. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type.
More Filters. Self-description in everyday interaction: Generalizations about oneself as accounts of behavior. View 3 excerpts, cites background. Self-presentation: Signaling Personal and Social Characteristics. Psychology, Computer Science. Social Signal Processing. Highly Influenced. View 4 excerpts, cites background. View 7 excerpts, cites background. Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication. Why do people lie? The reasons are as varied as human life itself, but there is almost always a reason, and these reasons can be categorized in a variety of ways.
Augustine, for example, … Expand. The Me and the Not-Me. Behaviorism at fifty. Each of us is uniquely subject to certain kinds of stimulation from a small part of the universe within our skins. Mentalistic psychologies insist that other kinds of events, lacking the physical … Expand. Situational Rhetoric and Self-Presentation. The situational use of language is a major vehicle of strategic self-presentation. It is now some 25 years since Goffman first brought to the attention of social scientists the importance of the ways … Expand.
Several years ago one of the authors CRS was conducting a psychotherapy group with men and women who had a variety of difficulties involving social encounters.
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